“By combining new technology with more traditional methods, we can describe Pompeii in greater detail and more accurately than was previously possible,” said co-author Dr. Nicolo Dell’Unto, a digital archaeologist at Lund University. Among other things, the archaeologists uncovered floor surfaces from 79 CE, performed detailed studies of the building development through history, cleaned and documented three large wealthy estates, a tavern, a laundry, a bakery and several gardens. In one garden, they discovered that some of the taps to a stunning fountain were on at the time of eruption — the water was still gushing when the rain of...

Today is the anniversary of the catastrophic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and the death of Pliny the Elder (born A.D. 23) in that event. The eruption, which followed several years of precursor ground movements, buried the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum and is thought to have killed as many as 15,000 people. Subsequent major eruptions occurred in 1631, 1906, and 1944, the last just after the Allies had taken the city of Naples in World War II. Pliny the Elder is remembered primarily for his "Natural History," a comprehensive compendium of ancient knowledge of the natural world....

Pompeii was an ancient Roman city near modern-day Naples in Italy, which was wiped out and buried under 6 meters of ash and pumice following the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. It is an eerie feeling to walk the empty streets of Pompeii and to view shops and homes left virtually untouched for nearly two millennia. One home still contains a complete loaf of bread sitting in the oven, perfectly preserved by a coating of ash. Now everyone has the opportunity to walk the streets and peer inside homes thanks to a detailed 3D digital reconstruction of an...

An ancient dry cleaner's where ancient Romans brought their tunics to be dyed and washed is among six newly restored buildings in Pompeii to be opened to the public... The opening of the buildings comes after years of mismanagement and bureaucratic squabbling at the historic site Spectacular brightly coloured frescoes and intricate mosaics were revealed across the walls and floors of almost all of the buildings, some of which were severely damaged by bombing during the Second World War. But the laundry, painted in a deep red and decorated with frescoes of birds and ornamental vases, was the most highly...

Archaeologists excavating a shop on the outskirts of Pompeii have found four skeletons, several gold coins, and a necklace pendant, according to an Associated Press report. The skeletons belonged to young people who died in the back of the shop when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79. There was an oven in the shop that the archaeologists believe may have been used to make bronze objects. There is evidence that the shop was targeted by looters seeking treasure after the eruption, but they apparently missed the gold coins and the gold-leaf-foil, flower-shaped pendant. Archaeologists have been excavating a second...

Oldest noodles unearthed in China Late Neolithic noodles: They may settle the origin debate The 50cm-long, yellow strands were found in a pot that had probably been buried during a catastrophic flood. Radiocarbon dating of the material taken from the Lajia archaeological site on the Yellow River indicates the food was about 4,000 years old. Scientists tell the journal Nature that the noodles were made using grains from millet grass - unlike modern noodles, which are made with wheat flour. The discovery goes a long way to settling the old argument over who first created the string-like food. Professor Houyuan...

A fresco-covered Roman villa, found underneath a church on Italy's sun-kissed Amalfi coast, is set to open to the public for the first time in July.... Italy's Culture Undersecretary, Antimo Cesaro... told Ansa the ruin was "a perfectly preserved archaeological treasure of enormous artistic value". The enormous villa dates back to the second century BC and was first unearthed eight metres below the church of Santa Maria dell'Assunta in central Positano, Campania, in 2004. Prior to its discovery, the impressive abode had lain hidden since AD 79 when an eruption of Vesuvius buried it under volcanic stone and ash. The...

About 400 years ago, a throng of dusty workmen laid down their shovels and huddled around an ancient painted wall -- a fresco, technically -- unearthed in a tunnel near Italy's Bay of Naples. The men were at work on a massive construction project, burrowing through a hill to build a canal for a local armament factory and mill. No one expected to find fine art. But as the workmen dug deeper into the hill, they encountered wonder upon wonder -- house walls painted blood red and sunflower yellow, fragments of carved inscriptions, pieces of Roman statues. The architect supervising...

Excavations at Idalion, Cyprus: Crossing Cultures in the Eastern Mediterranean 8 p.m. JCCGW Theatre 6125 Montrose Road Rockville, MD Ann-Marie Knoblauch | Virginia Tech University Co-Sponsored by the Hellenic Society Prometheas Cyprus was an important trade center and cultural ‘crossroad’ in antiquity, controlled and influenced in different periods by the Mycenaean civilization, the sea-faring Phoenicians and Philistines of the Bible, Archaic Greece, the Persians in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Roman Empire, and even Christian Byzantium. The ancient site of Idalion is fortuitously situated near the copper-rich mountains of Cyprus and the harbors of the coast. This prime location led to the...

Made from ancient grape varieties grown in Pompeii, 'Villa dei Misteri' has to be one of the world's most exclusive wines. The grapes are planted in exactly the same position, grown using identical techniques and grow from the same soil the city's wine-makers exploited until Vesuvius buried the city and its inhabitants in AD 79. In the late 1800s, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli first excavated some of the city's vineyards from beneath three metres of solid ash. The digs turned up an almost perfect snapshot of ancient wine-growing - and thirteen petrified corpses, huddled against a wall. Casts were made of...

Video at link and also at Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY_3ggKg0Bc#t=485 A good disaster story never fails to fascinate and, given that it actually happened, the story of Pompeii especially so. Buried and thus frozen in time by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the ancient Roman town of 11,000 has provided an object of great historical interest ever since its rediscovery in 1599. Baths, houses, tools and other possessions (including plenty of wine bottles), frescoes, graffiti, an ampitheater, an aqueduct, the "Villa of the Mysteries": Pompeii has it all, as far as the stuff of first-century Roman life goes.The ash-preserved...

Silty fen preserved burning houses and domestic objects inside them to reveal unprecedented view of life 3,000 years ago. Almost 3,000 years after being destroyed by fire, the astonishingly well preserved remains of two Bronze Age houses and their contents have been discovered at a quarry site in Peterborough. The artefacts include a collection of everyday domestic objects unprecedented from any site in Britain, including jewellery, spears, daggers, giant food storage jars and delicate drinking cups, glass beads, textiles and a copper spindle with thread still wound around it. The remains of the large wooden houses, built on stilts in...

Clues to Roman Illnesses in 2,000-Year-Old Cheese Oct. 9 — By E. J. Mundell NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A tiny piece of cheese, carbonized in the volcanic eruption that killed the citizens of Pompeii, is yielding up secrets as to how ancient Romans ate, lived and died. Using an electron microscope, anthropological researcher Dr. Luigi Capasso of the State University G. d'Annunzio in Chieti, Italy, has been able to pinpoint goats' milk cheese as a prime source of brucellosis--a debilitating joint disease that ravaged the ancient world. "Roman cheese was an important and continuous source of possible infectious...

A recently launched project that is performing CAT scans on the remains of Pompeii victims contained within plaster casts has revealed that good health was widespread among people of the ancient city. “For sure, they ate better than we did,” orthodontist Elisa Vanacore said during a press conference in Pompeii on Tuesday, after analyzing some of the initial results. “They have really good teeth – they ate a diet that contained few sugars, and was high in fruit and vegetables,” she added, perhaps busting the image of Romans as decadent banquet-loving individuals who loved nothing more than a good binge...

The tomb, unearthed by a team from the French Jean Berard Centre in Naples in southern Italy, dates back to the Samnite era, and is located at the Herculaneaum Gate at Pompeii. The Samnites were a group of tribes involved in fierce battles with the Romans in the fourth century BC. The tomb contained a number of vases and amphoras in perfect condition which give a rare insight into the funerary practices of that era in Pompeii. This discovery allows us “to carry out research on a historical period which has been relatively unexplored until now at Pompeii” said Osanna,...

Giraffe was on the menu in Pompeii's standard restaurants, says a new research into a non-elite section of the ancient Roman city buried by Mount Vesuvius' eruption in 79 A.D. The study, which will be presented on Jan. 4 at the Archaeological Institute of America and American Philological Association Joint Annual Meeting in Chicago, draws on a multi-year excavation in a forgotten area inside one of the busiest gates of Pompeii, the Porta Stabia. Steven Ellis, a University of Cincinnati associate professor of classics, said his team has spent more than a decade researching the life of the middle and...

'Bronze Age Pompeii' Found in Italy Dec. 3 — Italian archaeologists have discovered one of the world's best-preserved prehistoric villages, a "Bronze Age Pompeii" that was buried in volcanic ash near the world-famous Roman city almost 4,000 years ago. The ancient settlement was overwhelmed by volcanic flow when Mount Vesuvius erupted around 1800 B.C., smothering the village near present-day Nola in southern Italy many centuries before Pompeii suffered the same fate. "This is by far the best-preserved prehistoric village in Italy and one of the best in the world. Everyday life in the ancient Bronze Age is preserved there," Giuseppe ...

<p>ROME (AP) -- Archaeologists have unveiled another steamy corner of ancient Pompeii, and this time it is an eyeful: a bathhouse with a unisex dressing room whose lockers sport erotic sex scenes.</p>
<p>Italian officials inaugurated the new addition to the sprawling ancient city on Wednesday. Pompeii was buried by ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79, and the archaeological site near Naples is one of Italy's biggest tourist attractions.</p>

...The two towns remained largely undisturbed, lost to history, through the rise of Byzantium, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In 1738, Maria Amalia Christine, a nobleman's daughter from Saxony, wed Charles of Bourbon, the King of Naples, and became entranced by classical sculptures displayed in the garden of the royal palace in Naples. A French prince digging in the vicinity of his villa on Mount Vesuvius had discovered the antiquities nearly 30 years earlier, but had never conducted a systematic excavation. So Charles dispatched teams of laborers and engineers equipped with tools and blasting powder to the site of...

The 12-metre high pyramid allows visitors to walk along a track before entering it. It is built almost entirely out of wood with an inner dome made of fiberboard Inside, they will be find the casts of Roman citizens killed more than 1,900 years ago in 79AD when Mount Vesuvius erupted with devastating force destroying the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The plaster casts are placed in the centre, while the exhibition also features archival photographs documenting the work in the excavations in the 19th and 20th centuries. The photos are partly broken down into fragments and then reassembled...